They’re waiting for you Calhoun. In the expansssion pack…
Blue Shift is an expansion for Half-Life that was released following Opposing Force. It is a much shorter game, my playthrough was right about the commonly estimated 3 and a half hours, making it about half the length of Opposing Force and a quarter of the main game.
Stepping into the shoes of security officer Barney Calhoun, it is a simplified and streamlined game experience compared to the previous two releases. There is a stripped down selection of weapons from the base game, with the exclusion of the high end science weapons, Xen weapons, crossbow, and tripmine. Rather than using science or alien technology, Barney with more familar human weapons. There is a certain appeal to the idea of holding back inter-dimensional forces beyond comprehension by using good old fashioned lead.
The game starts similarly to the original game, with the player on a tram heading into Black Mesa. On notable sight is a very interesting looking dining area built out of the rocks and facing the tram. It never reappears as a gameplay area which is a baffling missed opportunity.
Barney has a bad morning which quickly gets worse, as the resonance cascade from the first game affects all of Black Mesa. While the player probably knows exactly what is happening, it takes a while for the game to explain it to Barney. Objects start out simply as moving forward and surviving. A few headcrab zombies make early appearances as shotgun fodder, along with vortigaunts and Xen wildlife.
In short order however, the military becomes the main threat for most of the game. They are quickly and efficiently introduced as unambiguous antagonists, losing their sympathetic qualities from Opposing Force and reverting back to the jovially mass murdering psychopaths from the base game. In their wake in the early game, there was noticeable effort to visibly scatter around scientists that had fallen victim to the military’s sweep of Black Mesa.
Barney is tasked with finding Dr. Rosenberg, a scientist who would be able to teleport a group of Black Mesa personnel to safety. Between the player and the Dr. is are wave after wave of HECU grunts however. The idea of fighting the HECU for long stretches isn’t a bad one, the military in Half-Life is a highly memorable enemy. However the marines have their limits, and Blue Shift exposes them by often making the combat areas in the middle of the game open and without interesting geography to complicate shootouts. These fights mostly come down to cutting a corner and putting a few magnum rounds or a burst from the MP5 into a marine, and repeating until all marines are dead.
There is one tank in the game, which sits statically and fires its cannon on a slow windup, it isn’t a real threat or interesting to kill. The rocket launcher still has the laser tracking feature, but without a moving target like a helicopter to take out, it is a legacy feature that doesn’t get any real use.
The marines retain their ability to cut through metal doors with blowtorches, which seems like it should be an imposing way to introduce them for a combat encounter but in practice ends up being a long cue to the player to drop an explosive satchel or stand back with a heavy weapon ready to anti-climatically mulch them.
This fighting goes on more or less until Dr. Rosenberg is found, and tediously lead to a lab where a few other scientists are working on the teleporter already. Barney, being more action and less technically minded is sent by the scientists to go into Xen in order to remodulate a…thing in order…to…modulate…the…uh…particles so that the scientists can teleport. Yes that’ll do.
The trip to Xen is mercifully short, and although the navigation puzzles aren’t overly challenging it is better than them being overly complex and frustrating. After activating the science machine, there is a short scripted battle with some vortigaunts, controllers, and an alien grunt that teleport in. Even for level ending setpieces Blue Shift doesn’t bring in any unique enemies, which is a shame. Barney eventually shoots up the place enough to escape its grasp.
Teleporting back to Black Mesa, Dr. Rosenberg tells the player that everything is ready for the final teleportation to escape from the facility. As everyone else teleports away, the player is greeted with the familiar sound of a blowtorch cutting through a door. The penultimate battle is, much like the other marine dynamic entries, something that can be cut short with an explosive satchel tossed to their entry point. A sprint into the teleporter sends the player through a short dimensional pinballing trip which ends with them meeting up with the scientists and fleeing Black Mesa.
The most famous, or infamous aspect of Blue Shift is the high definition model pack it came with, which replaced numerous character and weapon models. While I don’t think this model pack should ever have automatically been applied to the other Half-Life releases as the default model set (a decision which has been undone by Steam), I don’t actually hate most of the models. The upgrade is undeniably a mixed bag. The scientists look uncanny, with their increased poly count and higher resolution textures only serving to make them look strangely smooth. Other characters however do look better. The non-prime Barney guards that the player meets do look much healthier now. While the original Barneys were pale almost to the point of ghoulishness, the HD Barneys look unbothered, moisturized, happy, in their lane, focused, and flourishing.
The marines look even better. While the original marines were part of an amazing experience, the HD models refined their aesthetic and have set the iconic look for HECU.
Some of the weapon changes have been controversial, probably none more than the MP5 being visually changed to a Colt carbine. The new model doesn’t actually look bad, and the muzzle flash it has actually does look very awesome, but the weapon feels off with the new aesthetic. It shares an ammo pool with the basic pistol, which doesn’t actually bother me much. I can overlook a slight realism snarl with ammo for a weapon I almost never use. However the weapon needs a pretty good amount of shots to down enemies, and has a consistence moderate spread that makes it intuitively feel more like it should be an MP5 than a Colt carbine. In an ideal world, Opposing Force or Blue Shift would have added the carbine as its own new weapon to fill the spot for a slightly higher power, more accurate in short bursts but increasingly high recoil weapon to compliment the MP5. Oh well, I suppose that’s why we have Counter-Strike.
Back to Blue Shift, the experience was passable for a few hours, but the rush of its production is palpable. If you haven’t played Opposing Force and only have $5 in the Half-Life spinoff budget, that’s the game to get, but if you just have a hankering for a competent shooter with a lightweight campaign, you can do worse. Probably.
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